I really value and respect your engagement here: not more much more we can ask of each other than acknowledgement and engagement.

Your willingness to recognize and engage substantively in dialogue about our shared world – your concerns and mine – helped me make progress in understanding my real distress and that helped me sort the wheat from the chaff, so that you had a chance to help me understand your distress.

I am grateful for that, Marla. For me, that is one of the most compelling aspects of vowed life as a member of community. We each get company on the journey and we each promise to give company on the journey. We promise to be actively present for and with each other, even when it is hard. Very cool, Marla.

In peace,

Jean

Jean

Peace. Jean

Barbara, I appreciate very much what you say: “I read it as a book of FICTION, as Sister Julie pointed out…. He was not writing a vocational pamphlet and authors do twist realities (as they understand them) to make a literary point”.

Your statements work very well for me when I make the following substitutions:

****”press interview by actress, aka theatrical artist” for “book of FICTION”

and

*** “writing” for “acting”

and

“she/her [Heather Graham]” for “he/him [Mark Salzman".

Then, regarding Heather Graham's two brief comments about herself,
"I read it as a press interview by an actress [theatrical artist]…”

and she playfully referred to her own apparent Catholic upbringing and identity to tell a story about herself, about the persona she is trying to sell since her profession involves the use of self.

“She was not writing a vocational pamphlet and [actresses - theatrical artists] do twist realities (as they understand them) to make a [theatrical] point.

There is no material difference, in my view, between HG’s use of common “nun narratives” and Mark Salzman’s use of common “nun narratives”. I am a fan of a form of essay called “creative non-fiction” (David Sedaris is master, for example), and the social worker in me believes that is what HG what up to: a brief creative-non-fiction oral essay about herself.

What ***is*** is different is the response elicited here by these different creative, liberal use of “nun narratives” and the stereotypes implicit and explicit in those narratives. I have all kinds of questions about that (my analytical brain always has questions about everything; I am the person here who has said I often evaluate life in terms of “is there a PhD dissertation question buried somewhere here?” and then I fantasize the next seven years of my life devoted to that question) and you all don’t need to hear all my questions.

I do think I may have hit on what is troubling me about this whole thing and it has bothered me at other times.

What is the spiritual value of focus on others’ narratives about self?

I have tried to identify something in the Gospels that helps me understanding the spiritual “good” in concern about self and image such that HG’s two quips about self resulted in the response it did.

Should not our responses TO something ABOUT religious life BE, in fact, religious life?

I could find nothing that helped me discern the spiritual value in the censure here of Heather Graham’s “creative non-fiction” that employed common nun stereotypes to make her point.

What I did find was Jesus speaking in the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are those who are persecuted in my name”. People were going to tell a bunch of nonsensical stories about them such that would be persecuted even to the point of death. And they were to go on about their business, the business of love, forgiveness and salvation, the mothers of all “big pictures”, even with their persecutors.

My stepmother teaches 3rd grade CCD and, in a dialogue this spring on the triune God, a child asked, “Why does Jesus pray then?” Her response was gorgeous: “Because Jesus did everything to show us how to love OUR lives”.

Jesus did not dis the Romans were about to kill him, who were going to kill his apostles in their effort to kill Jesus’ ministry of love, forgiveness and salvation. Jesus did not dis people who persecuted God. The apostles learned not to dis people who persecuted God. And we’re dissing HG for saying “I’m too sexy for your convent”?

Who are we?

Jean

I also appreciate the several that mention other professions (and other communities) which are routinely panned in the media. As a social worker, I can think of several “social worker” stereotypes that have had recurrent roles and, in one case, a whole show built around them. They sometimes agitated me (is it possible I have some habits or tendency that support the stereotype and, if I wanted, could I change?). A real low moment, I think, for our professional organization was when they organized a formal, nationwide protest of the show (Norm). Where, I wanted to ask, was our sense of our own ridiculousness, our own particular brand of human silliness? Maybe it was in the protest, in the decision to take ourselves and images of ourselves so seriously.

In the end, it seems to me that the actress was right on: she is acknowledging in herself (more likely than not, with an eye to marketing herself for the next role or maintaining the current one and, thus, with her tongue in her cheek) about a provocativeness, a willfulness that *is* contrary to the vows sisters take: chastity would, indeed, be hard to maintain if one slipped into short skirts and low-cut tops for a vamp’s night on the town. And for all we know, she got arrested with Darryl Hannah earlier this week for protesting blow-the-top-off-the-mountain coal mining…

I like the idea of some order inviting this actress to spend time being loved by nuns. Not spanked. Just loved.